U.S. Officials Return to Pursuit of 1985 Killer of American Agent

MEXICO CITY — The last time Ralph Villarruel, an American drug agent, saw the notorious drug lord, he said he watched in dismay as the suspect raised a bottle of Champagne from inside a Lear jet, as if to mock the American investigators pursuing him as the plane revved up to flee Mexico.

The next time Mr. Villarruel stared hard at his face, the drug lord looked haggard and gray-haired in a newspaper photo but, again, he was slipping away to freedom — and this time perhaps a more enduring one.

“Who dropped the ball?” Mr. Villarruel, now retired, recalled thinking as he gazed at the image accompanying articles on the unexpected release from prison of the kingpin, Rafael Caro Quintero, the mastermind behind the 1985 kidnapping, torture and murder of Enrique Camarena, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent known as Kiki.

The team of investigators who pursued him decades ago have been reliving a nightmare ever since Mr. Caro Quintero walked free this month from a Mexican prison in the dead of night because his conviction was overturned on a legal technicality.

Mr. Caro Quintero’s release with 12 years left on his 40-year sentence “drove a spike in the heart of Mexican-American bilateral drug enforcement efforts,” the nine previous D.E.A. administrators wrote in a letter last week.

“This incident — the early release of the drug cartel leader responsible for the kidnapping, torture and murder of a federal D.E.A. agent — was particularly outrageous,” it continued, “because it represented a repudiation of the sacrifices that agents on both sides of the border have made for the last four decades.”

They have also begun talking to members of Congress about possible hearings and other steps to keep up pressure on the case, which at the time of Mr. Camarena’s killing sent United States-Mexico relations into a nosedive that it took years to recover from.

Aside from the death of Mr. Camarena, Mr. Caro Quintero was convicted of killing a Mexican pilot who worked with the agent and two other Americans a few months before Mr. Camarena was abducted on Feb. 7, 1985 — John Walker and Albert Radelat, whom he falsely accused of being drug agents after they stumbled into a cantina where he was holding a party. Mr. Caro Quintero was also implicated, but not charged, in the killings of four other Americans.

Two other members of the cartel, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, who led what was a forerunner of modern drug trafficking organizations, remain imprisoned for the murder and other charges. But Mr. Fonseca’s lawyer has said that he will seek his client’s release on the same grounds as Mr. Caro Quintero.

The investigators say Mr. Caro Quintero was on a rampage against the D.E.A. and anybody he thought was associated with it, because Mr. Camarena had helped uncover an enormous marijuana plantation in 1984, which resulted in a $2 billion loss to his business.

While at one point the United States virtually shut border crossings in the manhunt for Mr. Camarena after he disappeared — his mangled body was found on a remote ranch a few days later — the sense of outrage has been more muted this time, say the D.E.A. agents, who have little patience for diplomatic promises of cooperation from a Mexican government that has been wary of deep American involvement in drug enforcement on its soil.

A senior Obama administration official acknowledged last week that the United States learned of Mr. Caro Quintero’s release only after he was already free, a lapse the official attributed to confusion even within the Mexican government over the judges’ order, which the government has called an error that it will appeal.

“We made clear our deep concern with the way this happened,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The administration has received assurances that Mexico is closely tracking and doing all it can to ensure the other men remain behind bars, the official said. In the meantime, he said, the two countries are working closely together to find Mr. Caro Quintero, now that the United States has issued an arrest warrant and asked that he be detained.

Such assurances hardly mollify the team that investigated the case, a rare attack on a drug agent on foreign soil that exposed the deep level of corruption and collusion among Mexican officials in the drug world.

Top police officials were implicated in the crime and American investigators have long suspected that Mr. Caro Quintero’s ties reached the upper echelons of the Mexican government.

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Some suspect that is why Mexico at the time resisted extraditing him, for fear he would divulge secrets to the Americans “that would embarrass the Mexican government,” said John Lawn, a top D.E.A. official during the case.

But there were other complications. He could have faced the death penalty, which Mexican law prohibited and would give its government reason to reject an extradition request, said Robert Bonner, then the top Los Angeles federal prosecutor who oversaw the criminal case.

And Mexico, eager to get the case out of international headlines, made a key promise.

“One reason the U.S. government did not press as hard as it could have was assurances by Mexico he would serve his full 40-year imprisonment,” Mr. Bonner said. “It would be an understatement to say we are disappointed he didn’t.”

Even behind bars, with alcohol-soaked parties and access to phones, he was able to maintain his criminal empire, and his disappearance after walking out of jail is surely a sign that he still holds sway in the underworld and possibly among law enforcement, Mr. Lawn argued.

A panel of three judges ruled on an appeal that claimed Mr. Caro Quintero was improperly tried in federal court for what were state crimes. In their ruling, they agreed with Mr. Caro Quintero’s lawyers that although Mr. Camarena worked at the American consulate in Guadalajara, Mexico, he was not an accredited diplomat and therefore his murder was a state crime. He was ordered freed because of the amount of jail time he had already served.

To the investigators, it was just another escape on his part, recalling the frantic near-capture of Mr. Caro Quintero decades ago.

A tip led a team of agents to the airport in Guadalajara, where a standoff with heavily armed, plainclothes police officers ensued, as the agents tried to determine if Mr. Caro Quintero was hiding among them.

Edward Heath, then a supervisor, recalled barking into a radio to his fellow agents not to let the plane take off. But at the airport, the man they later confirmed was Mr. Caro Quintero, wearing designer jeans, a gold chain necklace, a diamond bracelet and a semiautomatic pistol in his waistband, huddled with a senior police commander, who then told the agents that the plane was cleared to leave. It later emerged that he had been paid off.

Looking back, Mr. Heath said, he wished he had been there, even if it meant “there would have been one hell of a shootout.”

Mr. Caro Quintero went to Costa Rica, where American agents tracked him. He was detained and returned to Mexico, where he was tried and convicted in 1989.

It did not end the swirl of questions around him. How deep did the corruption go? How extensive were his operations? What of the letter the D.E.A. received years later purporting to be from Mr. Caro Quintero, offering information?

“Even with the arrest warrant, what is Mexico going to do?” Mr. Villarruel said of the case now. “He is gone. The point is he was released, something went wrong and we want to know why.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 28, 2013, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Officials Return to Pursuit of 1985 Killer of American Agent. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe